About Democracy Quotes

#1. Everybody now seems to be talking about democracy. I don't understand this. As I think of it, democracy isn't like a Sunday suit to be brought out and worn only for parades. It's the kind of a life a decent man leads, it's something to live for and to die for.

Dalton Trumbo

#2. Whether people care enough about local news to pay for it is, sadly, an entirely different question than whether our democracy requires a strong watchdog function at the local level to ensure safeguards against abuse, chicanery, and outright dishonesty.

Eric Alterman

#3. The happiest thing that can be said about democracy ... is that it is one of the few systems that has been willing to risk a long period of confusion and mixed purposes for the sake of giving man a chance to grow up in mind and responsibility.

Harry Allen Overstreet

#4. In a democracy, supposedly we hold power by what we do at the ballot box, so therefore the more we know about political power the better our choices should be and the better, in theory, our democracy should be.

Robert Caro

#5. Campaign may invite a certain skepticism about democracy, but it will surely restore your faith in cinema verite.

A.O. Scott

#6. I'm worried about people who say Bush is lying. It's much more frightening that he's not lying, that he believes what he believes: that it's his mission to change the Middle East into a democracy. That's more unnerving.

Seymour Hersh

#7. What a liberal really wants is to bring about change that will not in any way endanger his position.

Stokely Carmichael

#8. There should be a democracy of voices in literature. There are people who live with a kind of striving and with a certain kind of tenderness - it's not an unusual thing - and maybe that's not written about enough.

Anne Michaels

#9. It would be easy to descend into despair, not only about the state of journalism, but the future of American democracy. But giving up is not an option. There is too much at stake.

Laurie Garrett

#10. A child who does not think about what happens around him and is content with living without wondering whether he lives honestly is like a man who lives from a scoundrel's work and is on the road to being a scoundrel.

Jose Marti

#11. In contrast to totalitarianism, democracy can face and live with the truth about itself.

Sidney Hook

#12. For politicians to be honest, the public needs to allow them to be honest, and the media, which mediates between the politicians and the public, needs to allow those politicians to be honest. If local democracy is to flourish, it is about the active and informed engagement of every citizen.

Rory Stewart

#13. I'm passionate about restoring the efficacy of American democracy, making capitalism sustainable, prioritizing advances in technology, and seizing the opportunities to use that kind of innovation to help usher in a new economy that doesn't rely on carbon-spewing fossil fuels.

Al Gore

#14. The principle of democracy is all about delegation of power by the vast majority of citizens through a few chosen representatives chosen on merit and competence.

N. R. Narayana Murthy

#15. There's a real danger when people get distracted by peripheral issues. They get distracted by democracy building. They get distracted about military conflicts. We need to focus on defeating jihadism.

Ted Cruz

#16. I was in love with HTML and certain that the whole world was about to learn it, ushering in a new era of DIY media, free expression, peace and democracy and human rights worldwide. That part didn't work out so well, although the kids prefer YouTube to TV, so that's something.

Jeffrey Zeldman

#17. I confess to considerable doubts about the eventual stability of democracy, unless buttressed by constitutional safeguards and a general climate of opinion which thoroughly understands the case for liberty in general

Lionel Robbins, Baron Robbins

#18. Every year, the White House Correspondents' Dinner inspires two competing varieties of coverage: celebrity-obsessed fawning and angry tirades about how it represents everything twisted about our broken democracy. It doesn't, really.

Alex Pareene

#19. Even Stalin proclaimed his love for democracy. We do not learn about the nature of systems of power by listening to their rhetoric.

Noam Chomsky

#20. We cannot cut and run. If we are to ensure freedom and democracy, it is essential that we follow through on our obligation to bring about stability in Iraq.

Richard Shelby

#21. Democracy is for infidels. A real Muslim is not a democrat because he doesn't care about the opinions of majorities and minorities don't interest him. He is only interested in what Islam says.

Abdul Sattar Abu Risha

#22. Vote? What's so fun about voting? You should never vote, everyone knows that. If you vote and your guy wins you can't later complain because you helped put him there. That's why I never vote, so I can later complain.

Sergio De La Pava

#23. If you distance yourself from reality and just cling to cliches about democracy find yourself a different job than analyzing politics

Hany Ghoraba

#24. Americans talked about voters the same way Russians talked about Stalin. They had to be obeyed.

Ken Follett

#25. While 1857 was about 'Swaraj ki ladai', the 2014 elections would be about 'Surajya ki ladai'.

Narendra Modi

#26. Democracy is not about one party dominating.

Ed Townsend

#27. Britain is still seen as a beacon for decency, for democracy, for vigorous judges upholding the rule of law and, dare I say it, a free press. I respect the press in theory, but when you see some of the things it writes about you, it's not exactly a happy relationship.

Cherie Blair

#28. Democracy is about voting and it's about a majority vote. And it's time that we started exercising the Democratic process.

Debbie Stabenow

#29. I don't have any formula for ousting a dictator or building democracy. All I can suggest is to forget about yourself and just think of your people. It's always the people who make things happen.

Corazon Aquino

#30. One of the most enjoyable things I do at Government House and when I travel around Australia is to talk with children. I tell them about our parliamentary democracy - and I often do that as I'm walking into an Executive Council meeting next door!

Quentin Bryce

#31. If you have a sense of purpose and a sense of direction, I believe people will follow you. Democracy isn't just about deducing what the people want. Democracy is leading the people as well.

Margaret Thatcher

#32. Although Israel was founded based on the historic Jewish homeland and the need to have a Jewish homeland, Israeli democracy has been premised on everybody in the country being treated equally and fairly. And I think that that is what's best about Israeli democracy.

Barack Obama

#33. I can deal with conservatives in a democracy. With real conservatives, I don't agree with them, but I understand why they believe what they believe and I believe they're being honest with me about it.

Steve Earle

#34. I think the success of democracy is not really police security; it's the presence of a broad middle class. The stronger the middle class of a people is, the less you have to worry about one group coming in and exploiting the democratic process for its own ends.

Abdallah II Of Jordan

#35. People have the right to protest - that's what democracy is all about. I have no problem with people exercising their democratic rights.

Condoleezza Rice

#36. In a democracy, we have always had to worry about the ignorance of the uneducated. Today we have to worry about the ignorance of people with college degrees.

Thomas Sowell

#37. For all their talk about the virtues of democracy, many incumbent politicians really don't like it when voters have a voice-not if that voice is effective.

Paul Jacob

#38. How can you put human rights to a popular vote and call it democracy? How many times do you need to redefine or haggle about the meaning of the word EQUALITY?

Christina Engela

#39. Capitalism is against the things that we say we believe in - democracy, freedom of choice, fairness. It's not about any of those things now. It's about protecting the wealthy and legalizing greed.

Michael Moore

#40. Community connectedness is not just about warm fuzzy tales of civic triumph. In measurable and well-documented ways, social capital makes an enormous difference in our lives ... Social capital makes us smarter, healthier, safer, richer, and better able to govern a just and stable democracy.

Robert D. Putnam

#41. If we're going to preach about democracy we're going to have to make difficult decisions. We're not going to sell our values out for basing rights, particularly when (Defense) Secretary (Donald) Rumsfeld himself noted that there were options to the base in Uzbekistan

Bill Delahunt

#42. You have to be ready for anything. It's a good reminder about democracy. Voters can tell you to carry on, or chuck you out. You've got to be ready for both.

David Cameron

#43. A lot of young poets today, from what I've heard and experienced, can't get their heads past George W. Bush, and I've heard so many poems about this democracy and this era of politics that I'm kind of bored by it.

Amber Tamblyn

#44. Pay 2 Play vividly tells the story of the threat posed to our political process by big money interests and what we can do to fight back to defend our Republic. This is a must-see movie for anyone who cares about the cause of democracy and the promise of political equality for all.

John Bonifaz

#45. I think the Egyptian people need to restore confidence that Americans, the U.S., means what they say when they talk about democracy, rule of law.

Mohamed ElBaradei

#46. The problem is that the things demanded by an empire, which is staying power, ruthlessness, the ability and the willingness to use its power around the world, it's something that democracies tend to be quite skeptical about.

Mark Danner

#47. He was as absurd as an Athenian demagogue, about whom Dr Faure had that morning been characteristically rude, since they were foreign, given to unnatural vices, and favoured democracy. Being thirteen, it was the unnatural vices that interested us.

Jonathan Grimwood

#48. Just the concept of personal freedom within a democracy, for instance, is a relatively young idea - only about 300 years old in this country.

Daniel Greenberg

#49. Democracy encourages the majority to decide things about which the majority is ignorant.

John Simon

#50. Despite the absurdity and the silliness and the triviality of the entire campaign experience, there is also something, as non-cynical as this sounds, kind of uplifting and strange about watching democracy unfold.

Michael Hastings

#51. Because we live in a democracy, and the people can't govern themselves well if they don't know the truth about the world we live in. What if our rich citizens never hear of the poverty and suffering of the rest of the city? Why should they ever give to charity or vote for reform?

Rosslyn Elliott

#52. There are servers, and there are people that are served. There's something contradictory about that in a democracy, certainly.

Lee Daniels

#53. [If President Bush is right about democracy in Iraq] I may, and I don't know if I can physically do this, implode.

Jon Stewart

#54. Get involved in an issue that you're passionate about. It almost doesn't matter what it is ... We give too much of our power away, to the professional politicians, to the lobbyists, to cynicism. And our democracy suffers as a result.

Barack Obama

#55. They were taught about democracy in London, not about tyranny in Cairo.

Ken Follett

#56. Though pundits and politicians, weary of the story, are happy to omit facts about voting systems and their private contractors running our public elections, such omissions impair voters and democracy itself.

Mimi Kennedy

#57. The great thing about our system of democracy is when they call you for jury duty, you have to come ... It's an honor and a privilege. I was called and I've got to be here.

Antonio Villaraigosa

#58. Great teachers should be paid like doctors or corporate attorneys. I worry about what will happen to our economy and our democracy if we don't start to take teachers' jobs seriously.

Ninive Clements Calegari

#59. The president had a press conference about this this week and he said that the U.S. has no plans to attack North Korea. And then he added, 'Like having no plan ever stopped me before.'. He has something even more deadly in store for them - we're going to bring them democracy.

Bill Maher

#60. Josh: So, Toby, it's election night. What do you say about a country that goes out of its way to protect even those citizens that try to destroy it?
Toby: God bless America.

Aaron Sorkin

#61. Democracy doesn't work unless people are well informed, and I don't know that we are. People just don't have the time. Most people's daily lives are just about surviving. Most people don't have time to really study [crucial] issues.

Brad Pitt

#62. Our minorities alone are in a position to know what the fathers of our democracy were talking about.

Sarah-Patton Boyle

#63. The real triumph of the state occurs when its subjects refer to it as "we," like football fans talking about the home team.

Joseph Sobran

#64. Political civility is not about being polite to each other. It's about reclaiming the power of 'We the People' to come together, debate the common good and call American democracy back to its highest values amid our differences.

Parker Palmer

#65. The worst thing I can say about democracy is that it has tolerated the Right Honorable Gentleman for four and a half years.

Aneurin Bevan

#66. Well my briefing was that Honduras was a small and vulnerable country just back on the path towards democracy it was about to have just before I arrived, the first elections for a civilian president in more than 9 years.

John Negroponte

#67. Although we can talk about an Indonesian democracy, or we can talk about democratic elections and democratic rituals - the trappings of democracy - we can't genuinely talk about democracy in Indonesia because there is not rule of law, and democracy without rule of law is a nonsense.

Joshua Oppenheimer

#68. Campaign season is the only time of public debate about what we want for the future. It can change consciousness even more than who gets elected. In short, campaigns may be the closest thing we have to democracy itself.

Gloria Steinem

#69. A free and independent press is generally considered essential for democracy, both to raise timely questions about debatable government policies and to report challenges to those policies when they fail.

W. Lance Bennett

#70. We have to be realistic about what we can achieve in Afghanistan. The notion that the United States can build a Western-style democracy there is a myth

Barbara Boxer

#71. To find ways of practicing democracy, not ways of orating about it, is our great problem.

Mary Barnett Gilson

#72. Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born.

Doris Lessing

#73. The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal. There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#74. Chant back to us our platitudes about democracy, greatness, and freedom. Vote in our rigged corporate elections. Send your young men and women to fight and die in useless, unwinnable wars that provide huge profits for corporations.

Chris Hedges

#75. We're more concerned about climate or economic equality or racial justice or anything else that is good for people and the planet, we simply must also spend some time wresting back our money-marinated democracy. This will require getting money out of politics and then getting people back in.

Annie Leonard

#76. I grew up in San Francisco. And so I'm informed in a certain kind of way about, you know, believing in democracy and believing in America. And I'm a very ardent patriot.

George Lucas

#77. We're going to have to forgive a great deal of the Soviet era debt. There's no question about that. Let's face up to that. We're going to have to put in money if Russia is really going to consolidate a democracy.

Jeffrey Sachs

#78. We are launching a campaign called Wind, Not War, which is about the alternatives to a fossil-fuels-based economy and looking at wind, an alternative energy, as key to that in terms of issues of global climate change as well as issues of democracy.

Winona LaDuke

#79. A constitutional state is like daily bread, like water to drink and air to breath, and the best thing about democracy is that it is the only system capable of securing the constitutional state.

Gustav Radbruch

#80. I'm an extreme libertarian, but I realize we're in a democracy, and in a democracy, people can have views of all stripes, and there's no reason to argue about it.

Eugene Fama

#81. We need a very progressive and strong agenda to bring people into the political process because I worry very much about the future of the American democracy where so many people are giving up.

Bernie Sanders

#82. For me, Westernization is not about consuming fanciful goods; it's about a system of free speech, democracy, egalitarianism and respect for the people's rights and dignity.

Orhan Pamuk

#83. True Democracy makes no enquiry about the color of the skin, or the place of nativity. Wherever it sees a man, it recognizes a being endowed by his Creator with original inalienable rights

Salmon P. Chase

#84. The point about democracy is not that it delivers legitimate, effective, prosperous rule of law. It's not that it guarantees peace with itself or with its neighbors ... Democracy matters because it reflects an idea of equality.

Rory Stewart

#85. In this film George presents issues that are important, essential and vital, whoever you are, about constitutional rights and the bedrock of a democracy. I am drawn to those kinds of stories because they inspire me - they are responsible to a populace and responsible to man.

David Strathairn

#86. International politics is never about democracy and human rights. It's about the interests of states. Remember that, no matter what you are told in history lessons.

Egon Bahr

#87. In some respects I have been the most unlucky because I have spent more time living as a refugee outside my country than I have spent in Tibet. On the other hand, it has been very rewarding for me to live in a democracy and to learn about the world in a way that we Tibetans had never known before.

Dalai Lama

#88. The amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an inverse function of the amount of complaints about human rights violations heard from there. The greater the number of complaints being aired, the better protected are human rights in that country.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

#89. We need to give the Iraqis a chance to build their own future. It should be in their hands. It must be in their hands. That is what democracy is all about. We can teach it, we can explain it, but they must want it enough to make it work for them.

Barbara Boxer

#90. In a democracy, someone who fails to get elected to office can always console himself with the thought that there was something not quite fair about it.

Thucydides

#91. There's nothing new about the government protecting corporations and calling it the freeing of the world or bringing democracy to bereft nations.

Henry Rollins

#92. The greatest power of the mass media is the power to ignore. The worst thing about this power is that you may not even know you're using it.

Sam Smith

#93. Why do I feel ashamed to use words like democracy and
freedom and brotherhood? They don't have meaning any
more. I have nothing to write about any more. Remember
all that writing I did? I was going to be a great socialist
writer. I can't make sense of a word, a simple word.

Arnold Wesker

#94. If human beings pretend to be God, then forget about democracy. If they understand that no human being can represent God, then sure.

Khaled Abou El Fadl

#95. I think art has a right - not an obligation - to be difficult if it wishes. And, since people generally go on from this to talk about elitism versus democracy, I would add that genuinely difficult art is truly democratic.

Geoffrey Hill

#96. We can speak of the triumph of capitalism in the world, but we cannot yet speak about the triumph of democracy. There is a serious mismatch between the political and the economic conditions that prevail in the world today.

George Soros

#97. "Democracy" means nothing else other than, "rule of the people", in Greek. There is nothing democratic about the political concepts of the United States and Europe.

Andre Vltchek

#98. Economic disasters or foolish wars are hardly guaranteed to bring about large-scale individual self-examination or renew the appeal of truly participatory democracy.

Pankaj Mishra

#99. Jazz is about freedom within discipline. Usually a dictatorship like in Russia and Germany will prevent jazz from being played because it just seemed to represent freedom, democracy and the United States.

Dave Brubeck

#100. If it is to be taken seriously again, the Left must find its voice. There is much to be angry about: growing inequalities of wealth and opportunity; injustices of class and caste; economic exploitation at home and abroad; corruption and money and privilege occluding the arteries of democracy.

Tony Judt